If “Coat Check” had spent the entire half hour in the titular room, with Abbi and Ilana trying on different identities for a half hour, I would’ve been totally cool with it. It speaks to just how funny, charming, and enlightening the two are on Broad City: there isn’t a show on TV – comedy or otherwise – that can take the absurdities and vulgarities of an Apatow script, and inject them with feeling, building characters whose complexity is not just a well of traits that are punch lines, but building these out into more meaningful, revealing portrayals of humans, albeit exaggerated for comedy’s sake.
Ilana’s attraction to herself (in the form of Ali Shawkat, former Uptight Citizens Brigade member with Jacobson and Glazer) sits chief among this: not only does this story make sense, but it informs Ilana’s behavior on so many levels. Of course she’d be attracted to a woman who looks exactly like herself; as she recognizes, she pleasures herself in front of a mirror, and often feels slightly self-righteous with all-accepting, go with the flow worldview. For what it’s worth, she thinks she’s beyond judgment – but when she meets an incredibly attractive version of herself who doesn’t smoke pot, Ilana finally learns that there is a line that can be crossed when it comes to the intersection of self-confidence, arrogance, and promiscuity. It raises an interesting question in a subtle way: how much should we love ourselves?
Now, this is not the question Broad City is really attempting to ask, but unpacking Ilana’s story makes for an interesting perspective on the generation of fulfilling career-seekers that Ilana, Abbi, and myself live in, and often find ourselves reflecting on. The idea of wish fulfillment is always something explored in cinema, but it’s not often characters get to embrace it, and then ultimately reject it. The same thing happens to Abbi when she meets Kelly Ripa, and finds out there is more to the woman we see on our screens sitting stage left to Michael Strahan (who sends some impressively-sized gift baskets, I might add).
Abbi first hunting down and returning Kelly’s coat is a wish fulfilled all unto itself – and gives us a great montage of the girls visiting the houses of rich people, something I always get a kick out of (last season, it was Ilana’s dog-walking that provided a gateway into the upper crust). But when she actually gets to hang out and drink with Ripa (and smoke something that “enhanced the visuals,” according to Ripa), Abbi quickly learns that she is out of her league, and all that entitlement and self-assurance about being America’s “good girl” (which I never considered Ripa to be, until Broad City pointed it out: she really is a poster woman for that phrase) comes unraveled, with her drinking moonshine and ordering prostitutes with massive muscles to “entertain” them for the rest of the evening (“But I ordered Dominos for after!” is a fantastic closing line for Ripa’s cameo).
As always, “Coat Check” provides a glimpse into the minds of our stars, but also uses their experiences as jumping off points for fun conversations about sexuality, comedy, television, and life in general. Broad City‘s ability to speak universally about the young adult experience (male or female, even though it has mastered the latter like no other show) without passing judgment or overtly trying to express some kind of philosophy is amazing. Broad City‘s philosophy – if it has one – is that life is to be experienced, no matter how awful, loud, dirty, or occasionally self-indulgent it might be. Life is about discovery – an important component of the second season, which usually leads to hilarious, often disastrous results. Yet it never fazes the show’s two protagonists, whose experiences continue to give them new layers and colors throughout this show’s amazing second season – if there’s an “inspiring” show on television (not called Rectify, of course), Broad City might be it.
[Photo via Comedy Central]
